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Showing blog posts tagged with From the Field

Blogging from west Kenya, William Harcourt-Smith, a research associate in the Division of Paleontology, is directing a 20-million-year-old paleontological site on two islands in Lake Victoria. One of these islands, Rusinga, is best known as the site of the discovery of the first fossils of Proconsul, an early ape. Harcourt-Smith’s multidisciplinary team includes physical anthropologists and geologists, and in addition to collecting fossils, researchers are trying to learn more about the evolutionary events and environmental conditions that may have influenced the emergence of Proconsul and other early ape lineages.

Blogging from west Kenya, William Harcourt-Smith, a research associate in the Division of Paleontology, is directing a 20-million-year-old paleontological site on two islands in Lake Victoria. One of these islands, Rusinga, is best known as the site of the discovery of the first fossils of Proconsul, an early ape. Harcourt-Smith’s multidisciplinary team includes physical anthropologists and geologists, and in addition to collecting fossils, researchers are trying to learn more about the evolutionary events and environmental conditions that may have influenced the emergence of Proconsul and other early ape lineages.

Blogging from west Kenya, William Harcourt-Smith, a research associate in the Division of Paleontology, is directing a 20-million-year-old paleontological site on two islands in Lake Victoria. One of these islands, Rusinga, is best known as the site of the discovery of the first fossils of Proconsul, an early ape. Harcourt-Smith’s multidisciplinary team includes physical anthropologists and geologists, and in addition to collecting fossils, researchers are trying to learn more about the evolutionary events and environmental conditions that may have influenced the emergence of Proconsul and other early ape lineages.

Blogging from Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, Emily Rice, a research scientist in the Museum’s Department of Astrophysics, is working with a collaborator to model the atmospheres of low-mass stars, brown dwarfs, and giant gas planets, including descriptions of their chemistry and clouds. A major new exhibition about the future of space exploration opens at the Museum this fall.

My first full day at Lowell Observatory was calm but productive. I situated myself in my temporary office, caught up with friends and collaborators, and reacquainted myself with the observatory grounds.

Lowell Observatory is located on Mars Hill overlooking historic Route 66 and the city of Flagstaff. There are dozens of buildings on Mars Hill housing telescopes, offices, public exhibits, machine shops, and storage. There are also two telescope sites with large scientific telescopes further outside of town, Anderson Mesa and Happy Jack.

The building where I’m staying is the oldest on Mars Hill. It’s called the Slipher Building after the astronomer Vesto Melvin Slipher, who in 1912 first measured the immense speed at which galaxies are moving away from Earth. Edwin Hubble combined Slipher’s measurements with the distances to those galaxies in order to show that the universe is expanding, a result now known as Hubble’s Law. Slipher served as director of Lowell Observatory from 1916 until his death in 1952, and he was responsible for hiring Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto.